The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black ResistanceAlong a Southern Waterway

By CDD Staff

The Inner Passage Book cover image

Ginna Richards

Virginia McGee Richards stumbled upon a hidden chapter of American history while taking a dip in a canal near her Charleston home, igniting a 15-year quest that birthed The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway. This 300-mile network of colonial-era canals, carved from Charleston to St. Augustine, Florida, by enslaved Africans and Indigenous laborers wielding shovels and axes, doubled as a daring escape route to Spanish Florida’s promise of freedom. Ahead of her April 28 event at the Charleston Library Society — joined by kayak guide and longtime writer Herb Frazier and featuring essays from Imani Perry and James Estrin — Richards shared how fragile plats, family papers, and ancient live oaks guided her archival dig, transforming overlooked marshlands into a visual testament to resilience.

In remote Lowcountry wilds, Richards revived the 100-year-old wet-plate collodion process, its chemical whims mirroring the moody, mutable waterways she captured in 60 extraordinary photographs of slavery-scarred landscapes and descendants whose roots plunge centuries deep. Portraits like fisherman-artist Sherman Mack, who docks his boat in the Inner Passage and paints

its gravestone-dotted shores, tracing his lineage, or Kathy Holmes, linking six generations to 1830s James Island matriarch Molly Fludd — whose clan still gathers annually to honor the passage — breathe life into this poetic archive. These images, she insists, form a “visual poem” where land, trees, and water whisper their own untold saga, evading didactic lectures for raw,

atmospheric immersion.

As Frazier leads kayakers through these shrouded cuts today, Richards’ lens uncovers not just history’s scars but its sly ironies: the very canals forced from enslaved hands became highways to liberty. Her work, blending rigorous fieldwork with 19th-century alchemy, challenges us to peer through the haze — does the past etch itself into the earth, or do we impose it anew? “They

were like the trees,” she muses of her subjects, steadfast witnesses to centuries of upheaval, urging viewers to feel the landscape’s pulse before history books catch up.

“Virginia McGee Richards’ breathtaking photographs visualize histories of Black resistance and resilience, while transcending time and powerfully reminding us that the past is an indelible part of the present.”

—Steven Nelson, coeditor

Black Modernism in the Transatlantic World.